I love hard science fiction. Actually all science fiction–Grace and I bonded over our love of the ridiculously cheesy Sarah Connor Chronicles this past year–but I remain fascinated by the darkened, measured futurism of Clarke and Asimov. I remember spending hours pouring over my dad’s copies of 2001, Rendezvous with Rama, The Caves of Steel and Ringworld. Phrases from these books formed the literary substructure for my whole life–and there’s something about the phrasing of those books, and the science fiction movies from the late seventies to early eighties, which remains poignant. The last survivor of a far-orbit spacecraft punctured by micrometeoroids, in the long months until rescue, turning as all listeners do, to Bach.

That’s why I enjoyed Moon so much. One man, serving out a three-year contract on a lunar mining facility, alone. No one to talk with save recorded messages from his wife and newly born daughter, and the company of a vapid, invariably rational finite-state automaton. If you haven’t seen the film, I strongly recommend it. It is best, however, to go in as blind as possible.

The film is visually astounding, reveling in the early-80s glory of space engineering. Hard bulkheads, rounded-corner insignia for which the interpretation must be immediately obvious to trained astronauts. There’s the slow drama of the moon itself, with massive harvesters stripping the surface and casting the tailings slowly behind. The modelwork is exquisite, enhanced by careful VFX, and retains the feeling of 2001’s massive spaceborne constructions. Even the Eurostile typography dates the film in a strange way–simultaneously classic and contemporary.

What really makes the film, however, is Sam Rockwell’s acting and the unusual plot. I don’t want to give much more away, but Sam portrays terrific emotional range and authenticity in what is essentially a one-man existential fugue. More on that follows, with plot details.

Spoilers Follow

Something strange happened in the film around halfway through. At first, it was an unfolding story of discovery, uneasy doubt in one’s perceptions and identity. Gerty might have been secretly conspiring against Sam, or perhaps Sam One might have been hallucinating the entire time. In that bizarre recovery scene, when Sam Two is silently watching from behind aviators, I wanted to scream, “What the heck is going on?”

But that sense of self-doubt dissolved rapidly, hastened, I think, by the mundanity of the scenes which followed. Yes, there was terrific emotional intensity, but it was all handled with such futility or everyday acceptance that I wasn’t captured as intensely as I was during the first half. Sam One’s decay is heart-wrenching; the scene in which he begins bleeding out into his helmet near Station Three absolutely tragic. I felt for him, for all of them, the entire course of the film. Yet somehow things weren’t as powerful as they could have been. The search for the secret room? Or even the discovery of the previous Sams’ deaths? They just passed by, flashed and were gone before their emotionality had really set in.

Part of the problem, I think, is that big parts of the game-changing action happen in the epilogue, not in the middle of the film. The refinery takes out one of the jamming towers. So what? The consequences were what I was hoping to see. For that matter, the towers themselves were so ominous I expected more from them. What else is buried out there on the moon?

So I left the theater feeling somewhat disappointed, at first. But that night, Justin and I talked things over for almost four hours, trying to unpack all the residue of the film. Could the company be justified in leaving Sam abandoned to die every three years, were he not lied to about his family? Who was he seeing in the final days? Did they know this sort of psychological (and possibly physical) breakdown was inevitable when Lunar Industries designed the program? Why so many clones? And why are we so willing to construct unquestioned continual realities for ourselves, as Sam One accepted his modelwork. What led Sam Two to wake up the third clone? Shouldn’t it have been obvious Sam One wasn’t going to make it?

It’s a closed system, taken to the extreme. Self-sustaining, with minimal need for resupply, even human. The high cost of human training compacted and re-used for centuries. Even the ominous nature of ELIZA’s “rescue” countdown echoes the monotonous cycle of the film’s musical score; closure and recycling is inevitable. But why so many clones? And did Sam Bell know?

Another powerful part of the film is the altered sense of mortality that comes with the hard science fiction genre. Decompression hazards. Extreme heat variances. The insidious decay of bones under low gravity. Ionizing radiation. You don’t deal with these forces, really, anywhere on earth. Because the dangers are so unusual, and so powerful, they have a special mystique–and their effects on people are more devastating. Humans really don’t stand a chance in space, which (at least for me) is both a challenge and a humbling reminder of life’s fragility.

Sam One’s death continues to puzzle me. As Dan Callahan pointed out to me, Sam’s symptoms are that of radiation poisoning, which is a very real danger with no magnetic envelope to protect you. Nausea, vomiting, fatigue, slow wound healing, hair loss… it reads like a textbook case of acute radiation poisoning. But there’s something critical here: slow radiation doesn’t kill you that way. If you make it past the first thirty days or so (the physicists’ rule of thumb goes), you’re going to live, because that’s about how long it takes for your bone marrow and stomach lining cells to regenerate. The surface of your GI tract–the fastest reproducing cells in your body–dies and sloughs off, which is probably why Sam was vomiting blood. Long-term ionizing radiation kills you by cancer, which comes on much slower, and with somewhat different symptoms.

Perhaps, given this, Sam One died from solar radiation and cosmic rays he was exposed to while unconscious in the rover. The base itself is built from regolith, and looks pretty-well shielded. On the other hand, he looked exhausted and suffered hallucinations before his involuntary EVA. Maybe we just aren’t meant to be alone for so long.

Can you imagine? Three years of your life, expended in the futile pursuit of some hopeless dream. Living for cut-together videos of someone else’s wife, of the exchanges belonging to an entirely different life. And to discover that secret? One’s own expendability? To find that your predecessors, weary of life, were incinerated and vacuumed away and that nothing changed? It’s a profound existential argument, and Sam Rockwell explores it beautifully.

Three years is a long time.